Mostly friendly audiences give governor a platform to talk about something other than bridge scandal

Mar. 14, 2014

In Middletown, for town hall No. 110, one audience member rose to tell Gov. Chris Christie how well his exercise program is working.

“You’re looking good,” the woman said.

Two weeks later in Long Hill, at No. 111, a bald man with glasses told the governor he considers himself among the “silent majority” in the state who support Christie no matter what.

And then a week after that, the audience of the governor’s 112th town hall erupted into standing applause when Christie suggested to one woman that she elect a new president.

For a leader with plummeting poll numbers from scandal, Chris Christie had enjoyed a warm welcome back to the town hall forum, a hallmark of his governorship that went on an eight-month hiatus while he campaigned for re-election.

He re-emerged in deeply supportive areas, and in turn fielded soft, sometimes parochial questions from an audience that was not just supportive, but at times rallying. And Christie slid into a comfort zone, playing both the sympathetic leader and the dispenser of hard truths — a Chris Christie Lite compared to the pugnacious, finger-wagging governor of past town halls.

But when Christie traveled to a town hall in Mount Laurel, a Burlington County town that gave him 65 percent of the vote last year but has shown it is willing to vote Democratic, his warm welcome went cold, at least for a few minutes. Half a dozen hecklers — all but one from Rowan University — interrupted questions during the town hall, shouting at Christie for hiring “crooks” and “liars” and for what they say has been the unfair distribution of superstorm Sandy aid.

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The crowd, which also featured two groups of silent protesters holding signs against hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, booed when the hecklers shouted and cheered when they were escorted away.

In previous town halls, “The rooms were packed with the Christie Adoration Club, and any time somebody got up they’d get shouted out of the room,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in West Long Branch. “What I find interesting was that the audience reaction (on Thursday) was mixed, and we have not seen that before.”

That may embolden other groups to raise their voices at future town halls, Murray said. Christie is scheduled to appear next week in South River, Middlesex County, where he won re-election by a much slimmer margin — 58 percent — than he did in the locations for the previous four town halls.

“He’s getting close to Democratic territory now,” Murray said.

Cherry-picking questions denied

A recurring criticism of Christie has been that he cherry-picks his audience and steers away from areas where he may be more apt to face criticism and hard questions. Of his 113 town halls, Christie has bypassed three of the state’s four largest cities, mostly minority areas which all lean heavily Democratic. Christie has held five town halls — in Irvington, Trenton, Paterson, Perth Amboy and West New York — with the largest population of blacks and Hispanics in New Jersey.

Christie’s most recent pattern of hosting town halls in suburban, Republican strongholds prompted the small group of protesters to show up Thursday.

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“Mount Laurel is a mostly Republican town. A hard-hitting question’s not going to come from the audience,” said Kailee Whiting, 20, who organized the group of hecklers and started a Twitter account, @AgainstChristie. “Nobody’s going to ask about Bridgegate. Nobody’s going to ask about Sandy money allocation.”

That has been mostly true. Through four town halls since the George Washington Bridge scandal, no one has asked about it. And with the exception of one audience member at the Middletown town hall asking why the administration quietly fired one of its Sandy recovery contractors, the Sandy-related questions have been specific and innocuous.

The Christie administration denies assertions of cherry-picking, pointing to the handful of town halls held in urban and Democratic areas and saying that the governor goes to locations where there are pressing, timely issues. And Ben Dworkin, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University in Lawrenceville, noted that Christie was re-elected by 22 percentage points, the most lopsided win in New Jersey in nearly 25 years.

“On one hand you could say yes, these are counties that strongly supported Chris Christie’s re-election, though pretty much every county supported Chris Christie’s re-election,” he said.

But other political observers believe Christie’s reintroduction to the public after news of the bridge scandal broke nationally has been a textbook example of crisis-mode public relations: Say you’re sorry, then find a friendly audience to rehabilitate your image.

“The real purpose right now is to try to move beyond these things, to move (the press) in particular in another direction,” said David P. Redlawsk, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. “This is what (town halls) are all about. They’re about being able to create an environment where you’re reaching out to the public, but more important, you’re getting the press that says you’re reaching out to the public.”

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The town hall meeting predates the Constitution, but Christie immediately put a personal touch on the forum, making it a sometimes raucous roadshow that secured his legend as a straight-shooting non-politician who doesn’t bend his beliefs.

Web videos went viral in 2010 when he dressed down school teachers, and perhaps his most notable exchange was in 2012, when he called a military veteran an idiot.

None of that rough edge has been evident the past month, but there was a flash of agitation Thursday when a man stood shouting at the governor over his use of federal Sandy money.

“Either sit down and be quiet or get out. One or the other. We’re done with you,” Christie said.

Some experts believe Christie is conscious of being viewed as a bully at a time when he is appealing to a national audience while rehabbing his image at home. A recent Monmouth University poll showed Christie’s job approval rating dropping 20 points in the last year. A Rutgers-Eagleton poll this week showed that “voters continue to experience more negative emotions toward Christie than they did” before the bridge scandal.

“He is overadjusting a little bit, probably being a little too kind for his own good, too non-Chris Christie for his own good,” said Dietram Scheufele, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and former fellow at Harvard University.

Mellow town halls

Christie’s public forums since the scandal could not have been in friendlier territory.

At his first town hall, he visited the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Port Monmouth, a neighborhood in Middletown, where he and his lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, won 75 percent of the vote in November. His next town hall was in Long Hill, a town in his home county of Morris, a Republican stronghold where he was a freeholder 20 years ago. And then Christie traveled to the retirement community of Holiday City in Berkeley, located in Ocean County, where Christie won the largest margin of victory in the state.

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Christie spokesman Kevin Roberts says that is all coincidental. In both Middletown and and Berkeley, he said, the administration chose to visit areas hit hard by Sandy to discuss the next phase of the recovery. And for the town halls in Long Hill and Mount Laurel, the 2015 budget was billed as the focus.

Roberts allowed that the town halls have mellowed, but not by design.

“You really haven’t had a high level of acrimony at these town halls. It’s just kind of the nature of what’s on people’s minds and what people are talking about,” he said, adding, “The governor goes into these forums very forthright and he can be asked quite literally anything.”

Scheufele said that for years the town hall has been used to promote a politician and their agenda and boost their likeability. Roberts denied that, saying that the governor likes being out and interacting with people.